Listeria monocytogenes, a bacterial foodborne pathogen, can cause meningitis, bacteremia, and complications during pregnancy. This report summarizes listeriosis outbreaks reported to the Foodborne Disease Outbreak Surveillance System of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during 1998-2008. The study period includes the advent of PulseNet (a national molecular subtyping network for ou...

Enterovirus 71 (EV71) caused a large outbreak in Taiwan in 1998 with 78 deaths, and smaller outbreaks recurred in 2000 and 2001. The outbreak was recognized because of a large number of hand, foot, and mouth disease cases and the rapid deaths of children with the disease. Virologic and pathologic studies indicated that EV71 was the most important agent related to severe and fatal cases and that...

An outbreak of acute diarrheal disease was reported in Kupang, Nusa Tenggara, Indonesia, in August 2002. An investigative team carried out a retrospective historical review of records, and a case-control study involving data and specimen collections. Etiologic determination involving stool specimens was based on an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay, with a reverse transcriptase-polymerase chain...

Ross River virus is a common mosquito-borne arbovirus responsible for outbreaks of polyarthritic disease throughout Australia. To better understand climatic factors preceding outbreaks, we compared seasonal and monthly rainfall and temperature trends in outbreak and nonoutbreak years at four epidemic-prone locations. Our analyses showed that rainfall in outbreak years tended to be above average...

Mathematical modeling can be a valuable tool for studying infectious disease outbreak dynamics and simulating the effects of possible interventions. Here, we describe approaches to modeling cholera outbreaks and how models have been applied to explore intervention strategies, particularly in Haiti. Mathematical models can play an important role in formulating and evaluating complex cholera outb...

TO THE EDITOR—Legionnaires’ disease is becoming a rapidly increasing public health problem in the United States, with the number of reported cases of legionellosis more than tripling since 2000 [1, 2]. Legionellosis, including Legionnaires’ disease, is typically caused by exposure to aerosolized water contaminated with high levels of Legionella bacteria. The incubation period for Legionnaires’ ...

On July 17, 2015, the Bureau of Communicable Disease of the New York City (NYC) Department of Health and Mental Hygiene (DOHMH) detected an abnormal number and distribution of Legionnaires’ disease (LD) cases in the South Bronx. This cluster of cases would eventually grow into the largest outbreak of LD in NYC history. The NYC DOHMH led the outbreak response, part of which included sampling num...

We represent an epidemic outbreak by its causal tree of infection transmission, where nodes represent infected agents and arcs represent the disease transmission from an agent to another. The tree structure allows us to calculate different magnitudes quantifying the epidemic outbreak using iterative approaches. We focus on the expected outbreak size, and analyze its temporal evolution for diffe...

This article addresses whether Ebola may have been present in an urban setting in Athens in 430 bce and explores the historical importance of the ancient outbreak. New knowledge from today's West African epidemic allows a more accurate assessment of whether Ebola may have caused the Athenian outbreak than was once possible. The Athenian disease, whose etiology remains unknown, developed abruptl...

Epidemic spread in single-host systems strongly depends on the population's transmission network. However, little is known regarding the spread of epidemics across networks representing populations of multiple hosts. We explored cross-species transmission in a multilayer network where layers represent populations of two distinct hosts, and disease can spread across intralayer (within-host) and ...